Robert David Steele's blog

What Can Countries Do to Advance Peace?

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The international book-makers are among the most intelligent and successful observers of the human condition. Right up to the night of the election in the USA, their odds against President Donald Trump winning ranged from 20-1 at best toward 200-1 at worst. President Trump won by accident. The US electoral system was and remains rigged in multiple ways, and the election of Hillary Clinton was “assured.” My previously published Donald Trump, The Accidental President — Under Siege! A Soft Coup Rages within a Closed Rigged System… is free online and automatically translatable into Russian, Turkish, and Hindi, among many other languages.

I mention this to emphasize that today, after the inauguration of President Donald Trump, roughly 80% of the US economic elite and their political servant class (both Republican and Democratic) remain staunchly against the elected President of the United States of America.

Premise One: President Trump is Being Controlled

There are two positions in Washington that truly control the composition and character of any incoming Administration: the White House Chief of Staff and the Director of the Office of Presidential Personnel. The first controls the information reaching the President and the shaping (or manipulation) of the “choices” presented to the President, and the second has virtual carte blanche to place over 4,000 political appointees, most of whom will not be personally screened by those loyal to Donald Trump and who therefore are much more likely to be loyal to the Establishment elite that seeks to hasten the failure of Donald Trump in every possible way.

Reince Priebus, the new Chief of Staff, was selected on the basis of his role as Chairman of the Republican National Committee (he was Debbie Wasserman Schultz’s counterpart with all that implies in terms of looming WikiLeaks exposure). He was probably also “recommended” by the Establishment as a condition for their tentative acceptance of Donald Trump’s “accidental” election.

The new Director of Presidential Personnel is Johnny DeStefano, who has been hand-picked by the Chief of Staff rather than Donald Trump. DeStefano was previously an aide to Speaker of the House John Boehner – the man who famously said of Trump that he is “barely a Republican.” DeStefano, who comes from New Haven, CT, has been a key apparatchik in what some have called “Boehner’s revenge.”

There are many who are very concerned by the rapid manner in which the Republican Party has been able to place its agents of influence with Donald Trump (Goldman Sachs has been if anything even more successful). If Trump is to survive and be successful, he will need strong support from those who can educate the American public in a manner not now accomplished by the “fake news” media that is in turn controlled by the US secret intelligence community.

Premise Two: There is an Opening for Russia

As a general statement, it can be said that the USA has been asserting its power through predatory banking and elective military occupation as well as through regime change and drone assassination operations managed by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) with supplementary funding from Saudi Arabia (the founder and funder of the Islamic State of Syria and Iraq – ISIS).

As a general statement, best documented in the book by Parag Khanna, Connectography: Mapping the Future of Global Civilization (Random House, 2016), the Chinese have been extending their power very constructively through commerce and the creation of infrastructure – building ports (including two in Israel), high-speed rail, and heavy-load highways. The Chinese have defeated the USA across Central Asia and Africa with this strategy of building for peace and prosperity.

Russia, while clearly a peer to the US and China, has not established itself as a global powerhouse in any one area – it may be that Information Peacekeeping (IPK) – a term I coined in the 1990’s – is an area where Russia could excel for the benefit of all. I stress that my definition of IPK demands that it be ethical, legal, and overt – there is no room in 21st Century IPK for disinformation and lies – they are too easily discovered and ultimately counterproductive. The truth at any cost lowers all other costs – no one else is committed to the truth – to the open source way – at global scale. This is an opportunity.

Premise Three: The Middle East, Jared Kushner, & the Truth – Why Not?

There is no truth to be found from any one source with respect to the Middle East. To overcome the vested interests of individual factions and countries, there is a need for a multinational open source center and network that is multicultural and multilingual and totally transparent. It must offer both holistic analytics, and true cost economics.

Russia has an opportunity – particularly in relation to the Middle East and especially in relation to Jared Kushner, Donald Trump’s in-law and future envoy to the Middle East – to become the organizer and provider of trusted education, intelligence, and media services that provide transparency and truth as a foundation for making peace. If not Russia, then India, or Turkey, or the United Arab Emirates. I don’t care. I am agnostic. The truth needs a home.

If Russia takes the lead as I hope it will, Russia will be accused of extending its “disinformation” tentacles but circumstances have changed. In the last ninety days the US public has begun to question the integrity of the US secret intelligence world, the US mainstream media, and the two-party tyranny in the US. If Russia focuses on Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) and speaks directly to individual citizens, it could achieve a coup d’grace on the Deep State, using only ethical, legal, overt information power. President Trump and Russia have a common enemy: the neo-fascist Deep State.

Creating an autonomous open source intelligence capability as well as a pro-active continuing education channel to the US public that bypasses the corrupt media in the US is not something President Trump’s team appears able to do. The Deep State continues to control the information domain in the USA, and it is unlikely that President Trump will be able to make changes at scale in the next two years, within the Intelligence Community (IC) or the mass media. If he does, all the better – the Trump Channel and Russia can compete on “best truths.”

All signs point to the Deep State in the US doubling down on propaganda in part to deceive the US public into accepting the official narrative. US funding for censorship at home and lies abroad is going to be increased. The Republican Party is now the primary front for the Deep State – this has been documented by Republican Party apparatchik Mike Lofgren in The Deep State: The Fall of the Constitution and the Rise of a Shadow Government (Penguin, 2016). President Trump is in enemy hands – his movements are controlled and every word he speaks is secretly recorded and analyzed by enemies of the US Constitution.

In relation to the US domestic information domain, OSINT can augment Russia Today (RT) and help create America Today (AT); RT can be upgraded to create a proper public intelligence network providing the American public with truthful and structured information about every threat, every policy, every cost, every demographic. The President’s Daily Brief (PDB) from the CIA is marginally useful – 4% at best of what the President needs to know, and more often than not full of lies and mis-direction. I am quite certain that AT could become President Trump’s first order of business each day if the Washington Bureau were given both the resources and the mandate. AT could become a model for other Open Source bureaus that would be renamed accordingly – France Today! Turkey Today! and so on.

There is another path to President Trump, one that could earn the Nobel Peace Prize for he, and Presidents Vladimir Putin and Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

Starting with the Middle East, where Donald Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner is slated to become the President’s Special Envoy, Russia has an opportunity to join and introduce to world affairs something that has not existed before: an Open Source Agency (OSA) – perhaps based in Istanbul – with two bureaus: one that creates decision-support for strategy, policy, operations, and acquisition; and another that sponsors pilot projects to solve the United Nations (UN) Sustainable Development Goals (SGG) with Open Source Everything Engineering (OSEE) which take half the time and cost a fifth to a tenth as much as existing industrial proprietary solutions.

Enlightened Arab nations (Egypt, Jordan, the United Arab Emirates, among others) and Iran could be invited as full partners in this regional information peacekeeping endeavor.

Kushner is an Orthodox Jew whose parents survived the Holocaust and have Polish roots. He holds a JD and an MBA and may be the single most powerful person in the USA after Donald Trump himself. Kushner is non-ideological and has owned a newspaper.

Although he does not know what he does not know, he has three things no one else on the planet has: the President’s absolute trust sealed with the bond of marriage to the First Daughter; indisputable Jewish Orthodox credentials; and a healthy distrust of the secret world and the neo-conservatives (Israel First!) who sought to destroy his father-in-law with a continuing campaign of “dirty tricks.”

Most significantly, he has the power to turn off all funding from the USA to both Arab dictators (including Saudi Arabia, the primary founder and funder of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria – ISIS) and to Israel, and to redirect funding from military purposes to development purposes.

What Jared Kushner lacks is reliable information in deep cultural and historical context. No one, anywhere, is treating the Middle East as a holistic analytic problem in which all threats, all policies, all costs, and all demographics are competently integrated in a multinational (and hence multilingual) endeavor.

Particularly ignored by the US political system that will lie to President Trump and his trusted surrogates at every opportunity, is the truth about Saudi Arabian and Qatari funding of terrorism not only regionally but also globally; and the on-going Israeli endeavor to Balkanize the Middle East at any cost – never mind tens of millions of dead, displaced, and diseased human beings. The Kurds, the Palestinians, the Sunni Shi’ite divide, and the looming water crisis are not properly addressed, in context, by anyone.

Jared Kushner also lacks access to imaginative solutions for stabilizing and reconstructing the Middle East – for example, he probably knows nothing about OSEE.

Inviting the US – under diplomatic auspices – to join Russia, in partnership with India and Turkey particularly, but welcoming other countries willing to provide intellectual or financial resources, could do three things, first for the Middle East and then for other regions as the model is replicated (for example, in Africa, Central Asia, and/or South America):

01 Collects, processes, analyzes, and makes sense of all information in all languages pertaining to every aspect of the Middle East. Deeply rooted in cultural and historical understandings that the US secret intelligence world is not capable of achieving, a new standard would be set for information peacekeeping.

02 Sponsors pilot projects for applying OSEE to the stabilization and reconstruction challenges; not only must all emigration from the region be stopped, but all who remain must have access to free energy, free and unlimited desalinated water, free housing and agricultural tools using the Global Village Construction Set (GVCS), and of course free communication with free access to the Internet and thus a free education one cell call or short video at a time.

03 Re-sets, in a tangible way, relations between Russian and the US and Russia and everyone else – it makes evidence-based governance and evidence-based multilateral negotiations a possibility. Combined with President Trump’s cancellation of trade agreements with secret clauses that are unfair to the average working American citizen, it opens the way for entente.

I must stress my view that the era of bilateral negotiations in secret is over. The only sustainable diplomacy is that which is rooted in reality and a shared multilateral understanding of the facts.

Premise Four: Presidents Have Positive Power

When John F. Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev were seeking a way out of the Cuban missile crisis, they agreed, through back channels that Khrushchev established through Kennedy’s mother, that their greatest problem was their own generals. While Trump is bringing in generals who favor peace through strength – and who may be open to closing all US bases overseas – he is surrounded by perhaps 500 traitors, and loathed by the tens of millions who thought they had a “sure thing” with Queen Hillary and Princess Huma. With Rex Tillerson being confirmed as Secretary of State (those opposing him were being blackmailed by the Deep State, that blackmail has since been neutralized) the way is open for Russia to propose to the US that we all explore “the open source way.”

The craft of intelligence (decision-support) is central to re-engineering the Earth and creating infinite wealth for the five billion poor, but no world leader, anywhere, is taking the necessary steps to advance humanity with information. As a an intelligence officer himself, President Putin, working with President Trump, is ideally suited to understand this vision and implement it in a manner that can help both countries, and their publics, avoid the long-standing influence of the financial-military-industrial-intelligence complex favoring war and waste over peace and prosperity.

I take the liberty here of providing one graphic. The ten threats are as prioritized by the High-Level Panel on Threats, Challenge, and Change, as reported to the public in A More Secure World: Our Shared Responsibility (United Nations, 2004).

It merits mention that among the many core policies from agriculture to energy to health to water, the US secret intelligence community refuses to provide decision-support on any of them – it obsesses solely on military threats and has been very slow to heed my documented warnings from 1989-1994 on the need to focus on emerging threats, non-state actors, and cyber-vulnerabilities.

In Memory of Alvin Toffler

Alvin Toffler became a friend in the 1990’s. He embraced my fundamental premise, that we need to shift the craft of intelligence away from spies and lies favoring war and waste, toward open sources favoring peace and prosperity for all. We still need some spies and some secrecy, but we must re-invent the craft of intelligence if we are to re-engineer the Earth and save humanity.

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